Tuesday, 22 October 2013

RPGPundit Reviews: Age of Treason: The Iron Simulacrum

RPGPundit Reviews: Age of Treason: The Iron Simulacrum

This is a review of the RPG setting book “Age of Treason: The Iron
Simulacrum”; written by Jonathan Drake, published by Mongoose. This is
the print edition, 200 pages long; a beautiful hardcover with an image
of the simulacrum, maps on the inside cover, good layout, and sparse but
nice interior illustrations, including a number of very good maps.

I suppose the first thing one should tell the author of “The Age of
Treason” is that puns are really the lowest form of humour. But that’s
really one of the few criticisms I can make of this setting. As I
mention above, its physically beautiful, and the interior content is
very interesting.

I should mention that this is not a complete RPG, but a setting. Its
designed to be “compatible with the Legends system”; which I’ve found
out is apparently something like Mongoose’s version of BRP/Runequest.

There’s
another criticism I think could be made of the game, which is that
sometimes the author is not the most thoughtful about how he structures
the contents of his book. He jumps right in with Chapter 1 telling the
story of the Taskan empire and its emperor (who ends up becoming a kind
of almost-god, and this means he’s separated from normal humanity but
still acts and rules through the aforementioned “Iron Simulacrum”, a
kind of golem of himself; and how there was a Marble Simulacrum first
that was destroyed). You get a lot of information about the emperor and
the imperial hierarchy (and a timeline-history of the empire), and I
can totally understand why this was done the way it was, because the
“story” of the Emperor and the Simulacrum are a central quirk of the
setting. But chances are they’re not meant to be the central thing a PC
party will be dealing with in the setting. In fact, odds are most PC
groups won’t necessarily ever be dealing with that guy or his golem. I
think it might have been more clever, in other words, to reserve this
section for later on, and instead start with a ground-level view of the
Taskan empire: what is it, what’s it like to live there, where would the
PCs start?

It may even have been smart to have started with an “out
of character” view of what the setting is like, some kind of
introduction that points out that the setting is not your standard
medieval-high-fantasy, but has more roots in the classical world mixed
in with a kind of sword & sorcery fantasy.

Things do get better from there, however, as we get right into
character creation guidelines. So largely the problem was that I don’t
think the introductory chapter sets off the right initial tone; beyond
that, by chapter two, you start getting into what’s important. There
are new rules introduced to the core of the Legend system, starting off
with Social Class. I know not everyone is a fan of social class
mechanics, particularly those used to freewheeling-D&D worlds where
there’s the kind of lack of class consciousness you only see in the U.S.
and Canada in the real world, but I personally think that few things
add more to an historical or quasi-historical setting than having social
class mean something. It instantly produces the feeling that you’re
not, in fact, in Kansas anymore (or Wisconsin, or Fantasy-Toronto, as
the case may be). In Age of Treason, social status is defined as a new
characteristic (ability score). It determines your available starting
professions and starting money.

There are several other differences as well: the introduction of
talents (innate skill bonuses), genius, and there are also caps on how
high you can raise a skill (their basic percentage x 5). Characters
begin with a basic set of common skills for their culture, and then
choose a profession which gives them certain common skill bonuses and
advanced skills. I should note that this list of professions and what
they can get/do tells me WAY more in terms of the nitty gritty of
“implied setting”, of what playing in the world is really like, than the
introduction did. There are dozens of professions available, ranging
from rogues to military men to seamen to country-folk to
service-industry people (like actors, barkeeps, courtesans, professional
cultists, medical quacks, etc), Artisans (you could call them
“professionals”, since they include things like surgeons and scribes),
merchants, gentlemen and scholars.

After this, we get into the description of the world itself. I’m
going to merely state that the world in which the Taskan Empire (the
empire of the Iron Simulacrum) is set seems to me to be both vaguely
familiar to anyone who’s ever looked at the classical world (its a
little bit Roman, a little bit Greek, some of the foreign cultures look
like other foreign cultures of earth), and also quite a bit different
and unique. This is not a setting like WFRP or my own Albion setting,
where you have a very close just-slightly-warped copy of a real world
historical period-place. Nor is it something completely vague and
unfamiliar like you get in some of the “too weird to live” fantasy
settings (of which I’d include Glorantha; the Taskan Empire seems much
more approachable to me than Glorantha); but its also far from
bog-standard fantasy of the Forgotten Realms or Greyhawk. So this makes
it somewhat interesting. There is both the familiar and the
unfamiliar; to give one example, you have Orcs, whose homeland is on a
different continent from the Taskan Empire, but they aren’t
cave-dwellers, they’re pirates. This section does a good job of laying
out the “rules” of the setting, in the bigger sense. You are told, for
example, that there are monsters in many variety, but humans tend to
kill all the monsters they find, so you’re only likely to find these in
far-away wilderlands. Spirits and demons (Daemons, really), are common
and important. A person who becomes an object of worship to a sufficient
extent may eventually become a god (though judging by the story of the
Taskan emperor, this is not an easy thing in the least). There are no
big bad Sauron-types, great unified evils waiting to destroy
civilization or snuff out the light of the world. Magic is relatively
common at lower levels of power, and has essentially snuffed out the
social need for technological growth and innovation.

Religious activity is very important to the setting. After all,
people are citizens of the Taskan Empire inasmuch as they are sworn to
worship the Divine Emperor. But they can worship other cults too.
Religion is very old-school classical-pagan, its described as
“transactional”; you worship because you get something in return. The
setting book provides a decent list of the Tarskenian Pantheon; which
are very much treated in a way that is more true to classical paganism
than most RPGs. “Pantheons” are not rigid structures or lists of gods,
but more like matters of convenience. Areas of influence are not all
neat and tidy with divine portfolios that are all very sensible (like
you tend to find in D&D), instead they’re extremely haphazard, the
product of organic mythological and folkloric growth. In game terms,
you can gain magic power and divine spells through making “Pacts” with a
god. Divine intervention and divine gifts are also possible.

Sorcery
(non-divine magic) is also a reality in the setting, and rules are
provided for the same. Likewise traditions (and rules) for spirit magic
and spirit worship. The book also provides some interesting guidelines
on “cults, clubs and secret societies”, which are clearly a big part of
the setting and probably would be an important part of any campaign.
These include not only things like cults of public or private worship,
mystery cults, etc.; but also things like elite military units that act
like a fraternity.

About halfway through the book you begin to get into the details of
the empire, the gazetteer if you will. You’re given an overall detail,
specific details about the most important cities, less and more general
details about other cities, vague details about the outlying provinces
and subject nations, and further territories.

Information is given
about overland travel, including things like sailing conditions if you
go by sea, and climate in general. Lists of possible encounters along
the roads of the empire are provided; they’re good and useful for little
encounters; I’m only sorry they weren’t presented as random tables!
Information about the other kingdoms besides the Empire are provided
in a following chapter. You have people like the Korantians, who are
apparently the descendants of the survivors of this world’s version of
Atlantis, and who strike me as being the Greeks to the Empire’s Romans.
You have the plains of Kitan, where the “Sheng” live, barbarian
horsemen that borrow a bit from the Scythians, a bit from the Huns and a
bit from the Mongols. You have the Theocracy of the Jekkarenes, which
are a moon-worshiping matriarchy that I think are otherwise supposed to
be something like the Jews at the time of Roman occupation, what with
this nation having been made into a “protectorate” of the Empire and the
worship of the Divine Emperor being kind of forced upon them. You have
the city-state of Sorandib, which is a city of magical artificers who
are in the last throes of decadence as a power in the world. I don’t
think they’re meant to be like anyone, exactly. And you have a region
called Assabia, that is mostly meant to be like Arabia.

It goes on;
you also have the Kingdom of Yegusai, a client state that was unwise
enough to have revolted against the Empire at one point, and the
Thennalts, different cultures of barbarians or semi-barbarians, some of
which have been incorporated into the empire and others of which are
undoubtedly due to be.

Overall, the gazetteer section of the book
is quite detailed and no doubt provides a great deal of information
needed to run a campaign in this setting. The world is clearly coherent
and well-thought-out.

The book also provides a “mini-campaign” meant to be an introduction
for beginning-level characters. This campaign is set up to assume that
the PCs are all characters who are from the largest city of the Empire,
Zarina (for which a nice map-illustration is provided), and are drafted
into the imperial militia, sent off to the frontier, and used as a team
of adventurers to accomplish the kind of missions and activities that
“irregulars” would be best suited for. The mini-campaign is divided into
various tasks, allowing lots of room for malleability. A flexible
timeline of events is provided (complete with a calendar you can
photocopy to tick off dates and thus keep track of time meticulously if
you so desire; and noting key feast days and important dates); it would
seem to me that this is set up so that the GM can either make the whole
thing a fairly strict and linear kind of campaign, or adapt it into a
kind of semi-sandbox.

The mini-campaign does a good job of adding
detail to the key areas the PCs travel to. You get another very nice map
of the destination-city of Pryjarna, and many details about the same,
giving you some very good “implied setting” insights into how cities are
supposed to be like in the setting. There’s also a smaller-scale
regional campaign map of the “frontier area” the PCs are billeted in,
with interesting local details, and a map of a military fort, a village,
a tower, and a caravanserai. You get details on encounters, NPCs, the
spread of a plague with guidelines on how to handle the illness which is
very instructive, ruins to explore, and more. This is a very large
section of the book, and its really what finally makes the product;
raising it above just “interesting but average” to something better.
The appendices to the book include some pre-generated adventurers and cultural background tables for non-Taskan characters.

So, what can I say in conclusion about the Iron Simulacrum? The game
is not without a couple of flaws in presentation, but these are
relatively minor; and the book has a solid finish that totally makes up
for these, in the form of his mini-campaign, which is one of those rare
cases of an “adventures” section that is not only not-useless but is
actually a truly great introduction to the setting. Overall, its a very
solid setting. I have to admit that it doesn’t push my own particular
buttons for a couple of reasons; first, its designed for a set of rules I
don’t own based on a system I don’t use for fantasy (love CoC, but
never really liked BRP/runequest for my fantasy games). Second, it is
definitely a decent “classical” (rather than medieval) fantasy setting,
but if I wanted to run a game in that context, I’d probably choose a
setting closer to history (something along the lines of what I did with
Albion). But these are just me.
I think that if you are looking for a fantasy setting that isn’t
bog-standard medieval, you could do a lot worse than this one. And
likewise, if you’re an RQ/BRP fan looking for a great fantasy setting
that isn’t quite as loony as Glorantha, without becoming in any way a
greyhawk-clone, this is again an excellent choice.